Falwell says Trump Offered Him Education Secretary Job

Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. says President elect-Donald Trump offered him the job of education secretary, but that he turned it down for personal reasons.

Falwell tells The Associated Press that Trump offered him the job last week during a meeting in New York. He says Trump wanted a four- to six-year commitment, but that he couldn’t leave Liberty for more than two years.

Falwell says he couldn’t afford to work at a Cabinet-level job for longer than that and didn’t want to move his family, especially his 16-year-old daughter.

Trump announced Wednesday he had selected charter school advocate Betsy DeVos for the job. Falwell says he thinks DeVos is an “excellent choice.”

Trump spoke at the Christian university in Lynchburg, Virginia, in January and Falwell later endorsed him.

Here’s Donald Trump’s Choice for Secretary of Education

Within minutes of being named Donald Trump’s choice for education secretary, Betsy DeVos pledged to oversee a “transformational change” in U.S. education, something the wealthy Republican donor has pursued in her home state of Michigan and beyond as an advocate for school choice.

“I am honored to work with the president-elect on his vision to make American education great again,” DeVos, 58, tweeted after the announcement Wednesday afternoon. “The status quo in ed is not acceptable.”

I am honored to work with the President-elect on his vision to make American education great again. The status quo in ed is not acceptable.

Just as swiftly came the backlash—from some conservatives who warned she had previously supported the Common Core education standards that Trump railed against during the campaign, and from teachers unions fiercely opposed to the kinds of reforms she supports.

“To clarify, I am not a supporter—period,” she tweeted Wednesday as questions circulated about her position on the Common Core learning standards adopted by many states to improve student readiness for college or a career.

Many of you are asking about Common Core. To clarify, I am not a supporter—period. Read my full stance, here: https://t.co/qB2nAXvX0B

On her website, DeVos said the higher standards supported by governors made sense at first but “got turned into a federalized boondoggle.”

Trump called her “a brilliant and passionate education advocate.”

“Under her leadership we will reform the U.S. education system and break the bureaucracy that is holding our children back so that we can deliver world-class education and school choice to all families,” the incoming president said.

For her part, DeVos was slow to warm to Trump. She told The Associated Press in July, “A lot of the things he has said are very off-putting and concerning.” At the Republican National Convention in July, she was a delegate for Gov. John Kasich of Ohio.

The choice reinforces Trump’s pledge to make school choice an education priority. In September, he pledged to funnel $20 billion in existing federal dollars into scholarships for low-income students, an idea that would require congressional approval.

DeVos, a former Michigan Republican Party chairwoman, leads the American Federation for Children, which along with its state-affiliated PACs contributed to 121 races in 12 states in the general election to support pro-school choice candidates, according to its website.

“In nominating DeVos, Trump makes it loud and clear that his education policy will focus on privatizing, defunding and destroying public education in America,” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said in a statement.

National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen Garcia said DeVos’ “efforts over the years have done more to undermine public education than support students.”

Trump’s appointment of DeVos is subject to confirmation by the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate. Sen. Lamar Alexander said the Senate’s education committee would move swiftly on the nomination in January. He called DeVos “an excellent choice.”

The new education secretary will oversee implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act, the federal law passed last year to replace No Child Left Behind. The Higher Education Act is up for reauthorization.

Former Michigan Gov. John Engler, who now heads the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executives that advocates for public policy, told The Associated Press that his friend DeVos is an “inspired choice” by Trump.

“She is passionate about the prospect of making sure that every child in every family, regardless of their economic circumstances, has an opportunity to go to a good school,” he said. “She’s the perfect person to take the Trump vision, which was articulated in very broad terms about providing choice and opportunity for students, and making sure that that can become more of a reality for kids who too long have been trapped in underperforming schools without any real options.”

DeVos’ support of school choice goes back more than 20 years. She was politically involved in the passage of Michigan’s charter school bill in 1993 and worked on an unsuccessful effort to change Michigan’s state constitution to allow tax-credit scholarships or vouchers. She has described that loss as her biggest setback.

She first became involved in politics at age 18, handing out campaign literature and appearing at rallies in support of Gerald Ford’s 1976 presidential bid.

Her husband, Dick, is an heir to the Amway fortune and a former company president. He ran unsuccessfully for governor of Michigan in 2006, spending more than $35 million of his own money in a losing bid to unseat Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

At his wife’s urging, Dick DeVos, a pilot, started a charter high school at the Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids. The West Michigan Aviation Academy opened in 2010.

The couple has four children, none of whom attended public school.

DeVos and her husband gave $22.5 million to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington in 2010, at the time the largest private donation in the center’s history.

Hours before the DeVos pick was announced, conservative policy leader Frank Cannon, president of American Principles Project, called her “an establishment, pro-Common Core secretary of education.”

“This would not qualify as ‘draining the swamp,'” Cannon said, referencing Trump’s campaign slogan. “And it seems to fly in the face of what Trump has stated on education policy up to this point.”

In an open letter to President Elect Donald Trump, IBM chief executive Ginni Rometty outlined several bi-partisan steps she thinks the new administration could employ to help create jobs.

Up to a third of the employees at some of IBM’s ibm corporate centers do not have college degrees, Rometty noted, adding the company needs to hire across developing areas, such as cybersecurity, data science, and artificial intelligence. These are what Rometty characterized as “new collar” jobs, roles that require defined skills but not necessarily two- or four-year college degrees. IBM, has cut thousands of jobs over all over the past few years, in what it has called a realignment around new opportunities.

Rometty suggested the federal government could improve health insurance programs by applying data analytics to cut Medicare fraud and easing secure data transfers of healthcare data between authorized providers. The government could also wield its purchasing power to lower the cost of prescription drugs and patient care, she added. (IBM is in the data analytics and security business.)

Rometty also noted that Trump’s reform proposal could “free up capital that companies of all sizes can reinvest in their U.S. operations, training and education programs for their employees, and research and development programs.’

She said IBM supported efforts of the new administration to pass tax reform early next year.

For more on Ginni Rometty, watch:

Rometty leads one of the country’s oldest and most legendary business giants—albeit one that has been challenged of late by younger tech companies in the cloud computing sector. But Rometty has IBM pushing hard in artificial intelligence, cloud, and mobile. With nearly 380,000 employees worldwide, IBM ibm remains the largest tech company in the United States.

Full text of the letter is below:

News of Rometty’s letter was first reported by CNBC. An IBM spokesperson said that nine years ago, Rometty’s predecessor Sam Palmisano reached out in a similar manner to then-President-elect Barack Obama.

Note: This story was updated to reflect that IBM has cut tens of thousands of jobs over the last few years.

No, Jack Ma Isn’t Putting 8-Year-Old ‘Mini Ma’ Through College

Despite media reports to the contrary, Alibaba Executive Chairman Jack Ma is not funding the education of his 8-year-old doppelgänger, affectionately known online as “mini Ma.”

According to Chinese state-run news agency Xinhua, the tech mogul offered to fund the education of his lookalike from elementary school to college, winning headlines for his purported generosity. However, a spokesperson from Alibaba baba on Tuesday denied the reports.

Xinhuareported that Fan Xiaoqin, a little boy from China’s Jiangxi province, was dubbed “mini Jack Ma” in 2014, when photos of him were taken by someone in his village and circulated online bearing a close resemblance to the tech giant’s younger self. “The boy soon became a cyber-celebrity and his plight has moved many,” the agency reported. “Ma was impressed with the look-alike.”

Xinhua reported that Alibaba had released a statement on Sunday confirming Ma’s commitment, saying: “To fund one child’s education is easy, but in order to help millions of poor children, more resources need to be used.”

For more on Alibaba, watch Fortune’s video:

Jack Ma himself did not come from wealthy means. He began his career as an English teacher and translator and went through a series of job rejections early in his career, including a rejection from KFC, before founding Alibaba Online in 1999.

Since then, Ma, one of China’s richest men, has appeared on TIME’s 100 most influential people list, and by some estimates, has a net worth of more than $30 billion.

Why Pediatricians Now Approve of Video Chat for Infants

On Friday, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued recommendations slightly revising its previous position discouraging media use for children under two-years-old. While emphasizing that “creative, unplugged playtime” should be the priority for infants and toddlers, the association now says that live video chatting is acceptable for babies of any age.

The Association also now says that starting at about 18 months, some media can have educational value for infants, with PBS and its famous children’s program Sesame Street specifically name-checked as appropriate. Even then, benefits depend heavily on parents watching programs alongside children, and then “reteaching” the content.

Shifting standards for children’s media consumption seem to have more to do with changes in technology than in the understanding of how babies develop. There’s evidence that interactive touchscreens are slightly better at teaching kids than video, with children as young as 15 months old able to learn new words from touchscreen-based activities. Even in those cases, though, children had difficulty transferring their learning to the real world.

Video chatting isn’t really an exception to those findings. A supporting document released with the new guidelines says that video chat interactions “usually are brief, promote social connection, and involve support from adults,” and so “should not be discouraged”. But the Association doesn’t cite any hard evidence that video chatting has positive benefits for child development.

For more on education, watch:

The AAP still says physical activity, hands-on exploration, and face-to-face socializing are the best ways for young children to learn, with a real ability to learn from recorded video not emerging until age three.

But despite years of discouraging media use for small children, the AAP cites recent studies showing that 92.2% of one-year-olds have used a mobile device.

IBM’s Ginni Rometty: Some Companies Are High-Growth, We Are High-Value

IBM chief executive officer Ginni Rometty took the stage at Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women Summit on Tuesday morning, a day after the company announced its third-quarter earnings.

The Armonk, N.Y.-based tech giant reported its 18th straight quarter of declining revenue, but both earnings and sales actually beat analysts’ estimates. That was mainly due to growth in the company’s cloud and analytics business—which is what Rometty focused on during her moderated conversation with Fortune editor Alan Murray in Laguna Niguel. That and, of course, the ups and downs of steering her company through a massive transition.

Sign up: Click here to subscribe to the Broadsheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the world’s most powerful women.

Many shareholders would opt for the former rather than the latter, but Rometty seems to have secured time to carry out IBM’s ibm transformation. Still, even as the company brings new and promising products like Watson, a cognitive computing system, to market, IBM—and its stock—remains under pressure.

Rometty talked about Watson’s growing use in healthcare, primarily in the field of genomics and cancer diagnosis and treatment. Watson can also be used to assist in retail and financial services, among other sectors. But does that mean that artificial intelligence systems like Watson could take over our jobs? Yes and no, said Rometty.

“If you step back and look at technology from every era, it has displaced jobs but also created a lot of jobs,” said the CEO. “One day we’re going to look back and whatever this era will get called, it’s going to put a premium on math and science.”

The debate on skills and jobs is an important one, said Rometty, who also answered questions on politics (“Trade is good,” according to the CEO).

“We have a big responsibility to help here [in education],” said Rometty. “We should prepare our future workforce differently. It isn’t just advanced STEM degrees. There are many jobs you can do without advanced degrees. I’m very optimistic on what can be done.”

For the past 36 months, Rometty has taught a monthly, virtual class to IBM employees across the world. “The idea is getting in people’s minds, refreshing your skills,” she said.

While Rometty didn’t endorse either presidential candidate, she did have some guidance for them both, saying the focus should be on issues like education and retraining employees and diversity and inclusion.

High Schoolers Are Graduating at a Record Rate

High school graduation rates have reached a record high of 83.2 percent, continuing a steady increase that shows improvement across all ethnic groups, the White House said Monday.

President Barack Obama planned to talk about the gains when he visits a Washington, D.C. high school on Monday morning.

Increases in the graduation rate for the 2014-2015 school year were seen for all ethnic groups, as well as for disabled students and students from low-income families.

Still, there were significant differences among groups. Asian Americans had a 90.2 percent graduation rate, while whites were at 87.6 percent, followed by Hispanics at 77.8 percent, African-Americans at 74.6 percent and Native Americans at 71.6 percent.

The growth in graduation rates has been steady since states adopted a uniform way of tracking students. In 2008, the Bush administration ordered states to begin using a formula that is considered a more accurate count of how many actually finish school.

The White House said that the graduation rate has increased by about 4 percent points since the 2010-2011 school year. Obama frequently cites the increase when he talks to groups about progress made during his presidency.

The White House said that money invested through a grant program called Race to the Top has helped improve some of the nation’s lowest-performing schools. The administration also said millions of students have gained access to high-speed broadband in their classrooms and that the states and federal government have helped hundreds of thousands more children gain access to preschool education programs.

The White House said that the District of Columbia made the most progress in 2014-2015 compared to the previous year. The District improved its graduation rate by 7 percentage points.

This Controversial Indian University Chain Is Coming to the U.S. in 2017

One of India’s largest colleges is expanding into the U.S. with the purchase of one campus in New York and a proposal to buy two more, drawing opposition from state officials in Massachusetts about the quality of the education it will offer.

Dozens of U.S. colleges have opened overseas campuses, but few foreign schools have sought to establish branches in the United States, in part because of the cost and tighter regulation. Amity University, a system of private colleges based in New Delhi, has long sought to create a global network of schools, however.

Since it was founded in 2003, the chain has opened campuses in India, England, China, South Africa and five other countries.

Add the U.S. to that list.

Amity paid $22 million last month to buy a Long Island branch of St. John’s University in New York City, which was selling the campus and shifting to a smaller site on Long Island. Amity plans to open its first U.S. branch at the 170-acre, century-old campus after it gains ownership in June 2017.

The chain also has made a deal to buy the New England Institute of Art, a for-profit college near Boston, and one of its sister schools, the Art Institute of New York City, according to paperwork filed in Massachusetts. The deal would require approval from state education officials.

“We are very, very skeptical about this,” said Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, who is asking the state’s Board of Higher Education to block the sale. “It’s hard to imagine that this outfit from overseas, which has never done any education work here in this country, is well-suited to provide any kind of education to these students.”

Amity hopes a U.S. campus will attract students from abroad who want to gain the prestige that comes with studying in the United States. It also hopes to forge research partnerships with other colleges, and to connect foreign scholars with their counterparts here.

“We have a global vision for education, a model of education which allows for student mobility, faculty collaboration and research collaboration,” said Aseem Chauhan, Amity’s chancellor. “We believe that the leaders of tomorrow will be those who have perspectives from different parts of the world.”

Owned by a nonprofit company, the chain offers bachelor’s and graduate degrees in a range of fields, from art to engineering. It enrolls 125,000 students at more than a dozen campuses, and has grown rapidly amid rising demand for higher education in India.

Its founder president, Ashok Chauhan, was charged with fraud in the 1990s by authorities in Germany, where he ran a network of companies. He returned to India and was never extradited. A plastics company in the U.S. also sued Chauhan in 1995 for failing to pay $20 million in debts, which led to an ongoing court battle in India. The university is now in the hands of his sons, Aseem Chauhan and Atul Chauhan.

Some in the U.S. say the school is more similar to a for-profit college than a traditional four-year university.

“They are a subsidiary of a conglomerate of companies,” said Barmak Nassirian, director of federal relations and policy analysis for the American Association of State College and Universities. “This is by no means reassuring, if you ask me.”

Aseem Chauhan counters that Amity has an “excellent and exceptional” track record of student outcomes, although he declined to provide the statistics.

The school’s leaders have been eyeing a U.S. expansion for years. In 2011, Amity was one of seven colleges that entered a competition to build an engineering campus in New York City. Cornell University and a school in Israel ultimately won. In 2014, Amity filed paperwork to open a nonprofit school in California, tax records show, but never opened a campus.

Amity has been pushing for U.S. expansion while some traditional schools close because of dwindling enrollment, and as many for-profit institutions seek buyers amid increasing federal regulation and oversight.

“The for-profit market is really wide open right now,” said Kevin Kinser, a professor of education policy at Pennsylvania State University. “An institution with a lot of resources might see this as a cheap opportunity to get a foothold in the industry.”

Chauhan wouldn’t discuss Amity’s proposed purchase of the two for-profit schools, and neither would the company that’s selling them, the Pittsburgh-based Education Management Corporation. But both sides signed a letter to Massachusetts education officials in July outlining the “anticipated acquisition” by Amity.

They say the sale would save the New England Institute of Art, which started making plans to close last year after half a decade of steep enrollment and revenue losses. The institute has stopped adding new students, and many others have left. Some former students are now planning to sue the institute for fraud.

Massachusetts education officials have requested more information from Amity about the proposal.

Even if it’s approved, Amity could face a long road before it starts work in the U.S. To begin granting degrees, it would need approval from a U.S. accreditor, often a rigorous process. And to receive federal financial aid for its students, it would have to be screened by the U.S. Department of Education.

Still, Chauhan said he’s ready to make his case.

“We continuously benchmark our quality with the best quality standards and the best accreditation standards globally,” he said.

Elizabeth Warren Isn’t Happy With the Department of Education

After telling Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf that he’d exhibited “gutless leadership” and noting that the business models of gig economy companies like Uber and Lyft are “dependent on extremely low wages,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has turned her critical gaze on new quarry: debt collectors working for the U.S. Department of Education.

In a letter published Thursday, Warren says that an investigation conducted by her staff has shown that loan servicers and debt collectors working for the Education Department’s student loan bank were continuing to actively collect debt from students who had attended Corinthian Colleges even though the Department knew that debt might be eligible for forgiveness because the students had been defrauded.

Corinthian is the huge for-profit college chain that shut down in April 2015 in the midst of a $1.1 billion fine and multiple lawsuits over its lending practices and inflated job placement rates. In March, the Department of Education announced that it had made findings of fraud at more than 100 Corinthian campuses and that it had set up an online system whereby students at 91 of them could apply for debt relief.

In her letter, Warren wrote:

For over a year now, while the Department’s student loan bank has talked extensively about helping former Corinthian students and has encouraged many of them to apply for loan discharges, only a tiny fraction of former Corinthian students—around 4,000—have actually received relief under the “borrower defense” discharge program.

According to Warren, her investigation found that “nearly 80,000 former Corinthian students are currently in some form of debt collection as the direct result of actions by the Department’s student loan bank.”

This did not sit well with Warren, who has built her reputation on standing up to corporations and government agencies in the name of fairness to consumers, first as a special advisor for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and then as a senator. In the spirit of her “gutless leadership” comment aimed at Wells Fargo’s CEO Stumpf, she wrote:

It is unconscionable that instead of helping these borrowers, vast numbers of Corinthian victims are currently being hounded by the Department’s debt collectors—many having their credit slammed, their tax refunds seized, their Social Security and Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) payments reduced, or their wages garnished—all to pay fraudulent debts that, under federal law and the Department’s own policies, are likely eligible for discharge and thus, invalid.

According to Warren, the problem is that the Department makes students apply individually to have their debt cancelled—or, in her words, to go through a “complex, resource intensive, unnecessary and baffling scheme”—instead of creating a system that automatically discharged the debt of all students the Department knew had been victims of Corinthian’s fraud.

Warren says her staff’s investigation turned up 79,717 former Corinthian students who are eligible to apply for debt relief but are in some form of debt collection with the Department of Education. Of those, over 30,000 are having tax refunds and other government payments seized, and more than 4,000 are having their wages garnished.

On the other side, the Department has received 22,185 debt cancellation applications from former Corinthian students, and approved debt cancellations for 3,787.

In response to Warren’s letter, Department of Education Undersecretary Ted Mitchell said that the agency would make more efforts to inform indebted former Corinthian students about their options, Bloomberg reports, while Education Secretary John King Jr.said, “We believe part of what is required is for students to attest they actually were defrauded by their institution.”

That will undoubtedly not be enough for Warren. In her letter, she asks for a written response and briefing no later than Oct. 14.

For-Profit Colleges Account for a Third of All Federal Student Loan Defaults

Over one-third of federal student loan defaults can be attributed to students at for-profit schools.

Students at for-profit colleges accounted for 35% of defaults during the three year period starting in 2013—down from 44% two years earlier, according to new data from the Department of Education, released Wednesday. Though it should be noted that students at for-profit colleges account for just 26% of all borrowers.

The report measured the number of students or former students who had failed to make a payment for 360 consecutive days since the loan was first issued during the fiscal year ending September 2013.

That comes at a time the DoE has been increasingly cracking down on for-profit colleges such as ITT Technical Institute, DeVry, Corinthian Colleges, and Brown Mackie College. Critics have accused for-profit institutions of deceiving consumers and pushing low-income students into costly loans.

In early September, the ITT Educational Services said it would shut its doors after the DoE said that students at the college were no longer eligible for federal funding. It was a death blow, as federal student loans accounted for 68% of the company’s revenue in 2015. Corinthian Colleges was also forced to close last year, while Brown Mackie College whittled itself down from 28 locations to just four.

Adam Looney from the U.S. Treasury and Constantine Yannelis of Stanford University attribute the higher rate of student loan defaults among for-profit colleges to the poor job prospects and low earnings facing graduates in a 2015 Brookings Institute report.

“For most borrowers (and the majority of the student loan portfolio) the education investments financed with their loans are associated with favorable economic outcomes, and borrowers are able to repay their debt even during recessionary periods,” the authors wrote. “These non-traditional borrowers were drawn from lower income families, attended institutions with relatively weak educational outcomes, and experienced poor labor market outcomes after leaving school. ”

While 15% of for-profit student borrowers on a federal loan have defaulted since 2013, 7% of students at private schools and 11.3% of borrowers at public universities defaulted in the same period.

Overall, the three-year federal student loan default rate fell from 11.8% to 11.3%, the DoE reported. Though the number of borrowers has also increased from 5.1 million to 5.2 million. And that, combined with the $1.4 trillion worth of student debt in the U.S., has weighed on the minds of voters.

Both Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump have weighed in on the issue of student loans. While Clinton has recommended lowering the price of tuition, Trump’s platform is less clear.

“We’re going to restructure it, we’re going to make it possible for people to borrow money, go through college, get through it, we’re going to make it affordable,” Trump said in a Twitter video session. The businessman though, is currently in hot water for his own for-profit education company (not a for-profit college, nor were its students eligible for federal student aid), Trump University.